Toni Ahvenainen
The Punctum
Season of Photographic Eye - picture 8
Week 48, Saturday
As I have already stated I'm not interested in commercial photography (but I want to learn to create as 'professional quality' as possible, whatever it means) or photography as an art (but I want to develop my aesthetic eye to bring artistic quality in my photography). So what do I want then? Why have picked up a camera and have used so much time and effort to shoot with it? To answer to this, I'm going to break it into two different posts. As the family photography is the most important thing to me in photography (even though I don't share it as much) I'm going to start with that and to explain myself I'm going to borrow something from Roland Barthes who was a French literary theorist, philosopher, semiotician and also fascinated about photography.
In his book Camera Lucida Barthes has come up with a great term for a specific photographic quality that describes a certain ideal what I'm trying to capture with my family photography. This term is punctum and it could perhaps be translated to sting, stab or bite. In Barthes's thinking punctum relates to essence of photography and to describe this term, I'm going to offer a very similar kind of example which Barthes gives in his book – it's pure coincidence is that I too happen to have a similar kind of picture which Barthes uses in his book to explain the punctum.
In my parents' home there is an old B&W picture of my mother where she is just three years old little girl and sits next to well on a sunny day. It's an old picture taken at backyard, sun shines right into her face so she has to squint her eyes, and while I can't quite make sense of her face, it still looks like she is looking into my eyes from that picture. To me this picture is special because it reflects my mother as a small girl before I existed myself. The world of that picture is now, of course, gone and so is that little girl as well, but the light from that very moment still travels into my eyes through the photograph. Looking at that specific picture makes me realize that it was I who became dictate the life and fate of my mother. The savaging weight of the photograph makes this suddenly very clear to me. Experiencing this temporal distance, my life and the fulfilled fate of my mother's life is the punctum – a stab or sting that I feel when looking at this photograph and it makes me feel a bit melancholic. Barthes claims that the punctum and the photographs ability to bond past and presence together through a material process related to photosensitive materials is what, in the end, separates photography from all other art forms. Right or wrong, I find punctum to be very useful term for describing the feelings some photographs have in our hearts.
When I take family photographs and look them afterwards, I'm always searching if I have captured any marks of life, do the images have potential for punctum, or am I just repeating conventional visual motifs, rules of thirds, leading lines, etc. With camera I want to capture the perishableness of life before it slips through my fingers and disappears – and because of this motivation there is always a shadow of death behind my eyes and in the way I look through the viewfinder. I'm particularly fascinated by the idea that with camera I responsible for creating imagery of Aura's early childhood (and imagery of our family in general). In this work the photographic eye is a visual and psychological tool which I use (or at least try to use) to imprint interpretation of our mutual time and life into material photographs. Ultimately it's a way of loving and nurturing something I feel precious – and also a way of realizing it to myself. I can't, of course, know if I have captured the punctum with any of my pictures, because the future and what will happen hasn't happened yet, and punctum is about bonding the past and present. I can just hope that it's there, in one of those shots I've taken of our time together.
But there are also the other pictures I take (like these that I share with this season), which cannot be categorized as family pictures. With those I have different approach and different reasons as well. Luckily the Barthes also has another point of view into punctum, which I'm going to tell you more about in the next post.
Year of the Alpha – 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: www.yearofthealpha.com
The Punctum
Season of Photographic Eye - picture 8
Week 48, Saturday
As I have already stated I'm not interested in commercial photography (but I want to learn to create as 'professional quality' as possible, whatever it means) or photography as an art (but I want to develop my aesthetic eye to bring artistic quality in my photography). So what do I want then? Why have picked up a camera and have used so much time and effort to shoot with it? To answer to this, I'm going to break it into two different posts. As the family photography is the most important thing to me in photography (even though I don't share it as much) I'm going to start with that and to explain myself I'm going to borrow something from Roland Barthes who was a French literary theorist, philosopher, semiotician and also fascinated about photography.
In his book Camera Lucida Barthes has come up with a great term for a specific photographic quality that describes a certain ideal what I'm trying to capture with my family photography. This term is punctum and it could perhaps be translated to sting, stab or bite. In Barthes's thinking punctum relates to essence of photography and to describe this term, I'm going to offer a very similar kind of example which Barthes gives in his book – it's pure coincidence is that I too happen to have a similar kind of picture which Barthes uses in his book to explain the punctum.
In my parents' home there is an old B&W picture of my mother where she is just three years old little girl and sits next to well on a sunny day. It's an old picture taken at backyard, sun shines right into her face so she has to squint her eyes, and while I can't quite make sense of her face, it still looks like she is looking into my eyes from that picture. To me this picture is special because it reflects my mother as a small girl before I existed myself. The world of that picture is now, of course, gone and so is that little girl as well, but the light from that very moment still travels into my eyes through the photograph. Looking at that specific picture makes me realize that it was I who became dictate the life and fate of my mother. The savaging weight of the photograph makes this suddenly very clear to me. Experiencing this temporal distance, my life and the fulfilled fate of my mother's life is the punctum – a stab or sting that I feel when looking at this photograph and it makes me feel a bit melancholic. Barthes claims that the punctum and the photographs ability to bond past and presence together through a material process related to photosensitive materials is what, in the end, separates photography from all other art forms. Right or wrong, I find punctum to be very useful term for describing the feelings some photographs have in our hearts.
When I take family photographs and look them afterwards, I'm always searching if I have captured any marks of life, do the images have potential for punctum, or am I just repeating conventional visual motifs, rules of thirds, leading lines, etc. With camera I want to capture the perishableness of life before it slips through my fingers and disappears – and because of this motivation there is always a shadow of death behind my eyes and in the way I look through the viewfinder. I'm particularly fascinated by the idea that with camera I responsible for creating imagery of Aura's early childhood (and imagery of our family in general). In this work the photographic eye is a visual and psychological tool which I use (or at least try to use) to imprint interpretation of our mutual time and life into material photographs. Ultimately it's a way of loving and nurturing something I feel precious – and also a way of realizing it to myself. I can't, of course, know if I have captured the punctum with any of my pictures, because the future and what will happen hasn't happened yet, and punctum is about bonding the past and present. I can just hope that it's there, in one of those shots I've taken of our time together.
But there are also the other pictures I take (like these that I share with this season), which cannot be categorized as family pictures. With those I have different approach and different reasons as well. Luckily the Barthes also has another point of view into punctum, which I'm going to tell you more about in the next post.
Year of the Alpha – 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: www.yearofthealpha.com